Bamblog

Achtung - das Bamblog wird seit Mitte Oktober 2007 nicht mehr aktualisiert. Bitte besuchen Sie mein neues Weblog unter http://www.schmidtmitdete.de. Danke! - Please note that this blog is no longer active. You can find my new blog at http://www.schmidtmitdete.de. Thanks for visiting!

Elmine Wijnia published a very informing and concise paper on “Understanding Weblogs: A communicative perspective”, applying Habermas’ theory of communicative action to Weblogs.

It’s good to see someone bring Habermas into the weblog-discourse - especially for those “technological optimists” thinking along the lines of (for example) Ito’s “emergent democracy”, Habermas’ ideas about the public sphere and the ideal speech situation are pretty important!

To continue Elmine’s thought, it would be interesting to look the connections of and differences between Weblog-as-Text, Weblog-as-software/code, and individual agents (including the roles of author, commenter, reader/lurker). Analytically, those three “units of analysis” should be separated to identify the distinct contributions or limitations of each for the ideal speech situation. Some points:

- the technological base of weblogs, the software / code may restrict certain features (access, comments switched off, …). Wijnia narrows her definition down to include only Weblogs which enable conversation, but to assess the full potential of Weblogs for a critical/political public, the role “broadcast-weblogs” would have to be reflected, too.

- the weblog-as-text consists of the individual posts, but the conversation/the public emerges only _across_ those Weblogs connected through links, trackbacks, etc.. Now the public has always had the element of “disperseness” (think about the classic mass media audience), so what happens when the disperse elements “crystallize” around visible links?

- the characteristics of the individual agents who engage in practices of blogging are important, because they tell us something about motives (does a political public emerge intentionally or as an unintended consequence of other actions?), routines, roles, …

Since it looks like I’m going to give a class on “social software” this semester, I’ll continue on these ideas; the paper will be mandatory reading for my students..